Robert Wood: Robotic Insects

Electrical engineer Robert Wood leads a team that invents and develops entirely new classes of mircrorobots poised to play a transformative role in medicine, search-and-rescue missions, and agriculture.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.

Robert Wood: Robotic Insects

Electrical engineer Robert Wood leads a team that invents and develops entirely new classes of mircrorobots poised to play a transformative role in medicine, search-and-rescue missions, and agriculture.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.

Robert: I'm going to start off with a bold and probably unsubstantiated claim which is that robotics is the next internet. What I mean by that is it's the next big thing to impact our lives whether it's biomedical applications, whether it's automating our daily lives. Before I get into what I think are the big topics, the hot topics in some of our research, I want to give you a little bit of history. Robotics as a term was coined actually back in the 1920's by a Czech playwright in a play called Rossum's Universal Robots. Apparently, the play wasn't very good but nonetheless, it brought the word robots to the English language. In fact, the word initially meant the use of mechanized labor. Basically, doing things that we didn't wanna do, automating our lives. The next example I'll give is from Fritz Lang's Metropolis which I'm sure most of you have seen or if not, have seen some of the iconic art work from this film. Another example progressing on in terms of time is Asimov's robot series. I won't keep going on forward through Terminator movies and Star Wars movies and that sort of thing.

You'll notice a theme in these examples is the robot uprising and the dystopic view of what robots will do to the world. To depart from that, I'd like to give an example of what I think are my two favorite robots in history. Voyager 1 was a robot. It was a teleoperated robot but it took one of the most profound pictures, I'm sure you now agree, of earth. This is back in 1990. The second photo that I think is very telling about not just robots but human curiosity and the advances of technology is what I would think is one of the first robot selfies which is the Curiosity rover on Mars. These are two of my favorite images and what I find the most powerful and moving photographs that I've ever seen.

Okay, that said and if you think about these examples and you think about all the science fiction movies that you've seen that have robots in them, you could be asking, “Where are all the robots? Why are there no robots that are making me dinner, and folding my clothes et cetera?” The answer is that there's a lot of big challenges. There's a lot of difficulty in bringing these things to real life. I'll show you just a couple brief examples of where these things actually exist in modern life and technology.

One is the things that are welding the doors on your cars in the assembly line. These are big, bulky, very precise fast things. One of the things you'll notice in this is that there's no humans anywhere near these because they're very dangerous. Thinking about adopting these technologies to more household or everyday use, there's some challenges there. Perhaps, you have one of these in your house. Here's what might be the first useful, accessible robotic technology that you can use.

The obligatory bullet points to tell you what we are working on and our view of the world in terms of the opportunities in robotics. The opportunities to get these things to be more useful, more ubiquitous, cheaper, et cetera, we focus on a couple of things. One is... I guess they can be collectively combined into where we get our inspiration. The first one is inspiration from nature. For a lot of the different functions that we might to achieve with our robots there is likely a biologic analog. We work with biologists extensively to try to extract out those principles and try to embody them in our engineered systems. The second one is non-traditional places. That'll become a little bit more clear in a few slides when I show you some of the ways that we actually build these robots. What I'm going to talk about is one example, I guess a couple of examples, but one example in particular of bioinspired robots and to do this, we have to answer questions in new manufacturing, new materials in ways of building these systems.

Okay so to phrase this question, let's watch these video. This is a carpenter bee. As an engineer, I can look at this and start to ask some really well-posed questions that drives some of our research. “How are the wings moving? How are the wings interacting with the air and generating vortices that it's then manipulating through its wings? What is the thoracic mechanics that is moving the wings about? What is the muscular that's driving thoracic mechanics? What are the metabolic processes that are driving the muscles, that are driving the mechanics, that are driving the wings? What is the flight mode? What are the sensors that it's using? What are the control methodologies? What is the neurobiology?” All these really interesting questions... ...that we as engineers can start to sort of boil down into the topics that we have to work on if we wanted to actually make one of these.

This is the... one prototype of our robotic insects. I'm not going to pass it around. I'd be happy to show it to you afterwards. Questions about if we're going to make something that operates like this, this is just an animation of a hoverfly. If we're going to make something in an engineered system that works something like this, how do we do it? What are the answers to those questions that I just posed that are derived from these natural systems? One of the biggest ones is how do you make it? The first question that I had is how would I piece together the components for this? I would argue that I don't want to do it this way. I don't want to take hundreds or even thousands of very complex geometrical components and piece them together under a microscope. That would my drive my graduate students crazy. That wouldn't work. We had to come up with alternative solutions. I'm contradicting myself because this is actually an attempt to sort of a nuts and bolts approach, to actually piece together components. This is the old way before we had the discovery which I'll show you in a minute. This is literally what it looks like. You're actually piecing together all the different components and I won't get into the details what these things are. There are the motors. There are the wings. There are the little mechanisms that cause the thing to move properly and that sort of thing.

If we want to get around that, how do we do this? Well, it turns out we took inspiration from, I guess in hindsight, is a nontraditional place, my son's library. My son at the time, a couple of years ago, was really into pop-up books. If you think about a pop-up book, I think about it as fantastically complicated structures and mechanisms that are created by extremely unskilled users. I'm not talking about the people that made the book. I'm talking about the kids that operate the books. You open up the books. You do something very simple like opening a page or pulling something and out of this page comes these fantastic structures. We do something very similar. We call this process pop-up book MEMS. It goes as follows. You basically build all of the components that you want. Like I said, the motors, the wings, et cetera. You also build a scaffold around it. That's what this sort of surrounding area is here. Then by proper design of all the individual components in this quasi two-dimensional composite. If it's designed right and constructed properly, which of course I'm not getting much into the details, then all I'd have to do is push on it and that's we'll show in this video. All you have to do is push on it and out pops the device that I want because all of the trajectories that are associated with the assembly of this device are controlled by the mechanisms that are built into this pop-up structure. This allows us to build our computational origami friends. This is a real thing. Actually, you can prove that you can make anything you want in terms of any geometric complexity, any mechanism that you want to build can be done in this way. We can make things arbitrarily complicated. We can make things with any material combination, metals, composites, polymer, ceramics, doesn't matter. We can do this very quickly.

We're experimental robotics, we know actually very little about the physics of the devices that we make. Not for lack of trying but just because it's complex, fluid structure interactions, all these difficult things. What we do then is we build and test, build and test, and often test to failure as I'll show you in a moment. This is a resulting device. You'll notice that every device that I show you will look different. That's just because we learn something and change the design and reiterate on that. I should mention the way that we're building things, this concept of a scaffold building all the components for you. We like to think in some way fulfills Richard Feynman's prophecy about small robots building small robots. That's the way that we think about this. We can build things in bulk just by the fact that this is inherently parallelizable process. Bulk, for us, is only a few but that's okay. We plugged these things in. We test them. Flap wings around, do some system identification, all sorts of interesting things to try to understand how this thing actually works. Then plug it in, turn it on. This has sped down by a factor of one eighth and this is what happens... ...every time. In fact, if you look at it in real time, this is very fast. This is just a consequence of the dynamics of this system.

Insects are very unlike the airplanes that we ride in. The 747s of the world are designed to be passively stable. If the engines turn off, it should glide down to safety without the presence of active control. Insects are not that way. They're unstable and this leads to the maneuverability that you've experienced if you ever try to swat them. What I'm saying is they're the fighter jets of the world. If we can properly stabilize these systems then they become quite maneuverable. After plenty of trial and error, again this has sped down one eighth time. We are able to control the flight of these things. One of the first demonstrations that we had, which we were very excited about a couple of years ago, was just hover. It turns out that's one of the more difficult things that we can try to do. We can also take advantage of some of these fast dynamics that I was alluding to and also some of the physics of scaling to allow these things to perch.

Once we have these things working, we're doing all sorts of cute demonstrations of how they can behave like the insects that we try to mimic. I just want to wrap up with a couple of other topics and other broad statements of course. We also make a host of other bioinspired robots. I'm showing you these not just because they're cool or creepy but because they actually represent one of our big pushes which is all of our bioinspired work takes cues from nature and tries to instantiate that in robots. We're actually seeing that arrow of bioinspiration reverse because now we can start to build robots which mimics some of the features of natural systems that we can test our hypothesis on natural systems and I say us, our biologist colleagues, in ways that would be difficult to do with the actual animal.

This is really exciting for us. We also make little cockroach-like robots. This is in real time. I'm just showing you this because we can make claims that these things are actually some of the fastest robots in the world if you normalize the body length which of course a caveat. In fact, twice as fast as Usain Bolt.

Okay. I often get the questions so I will preemptively answer it which is what would you do with these things? Why are you doing this? The main thing that gets us excited is that it's a basic research topic that all of these topics in fluid mechanics and microfabrication and bioengineering, et cetera are what really drive us. The technology fallout that comes from this meaning technology fallout like I have a former student that started a company that's trying to find commercial applications for the way that we build things. We also have prototypes for making little, minimally invasive surgical tools using the same techniques. But you can also use these things in the future, 10-20 years down the road when they're working for things like search and rescue where a firefighter might have a thousand of these things onsite that flies through a building looking for human survivors, or even hazardous environment explorations, space exploration, et cetera. These are the common themes that are the longer term goals of this.

Lastly, I'll say that these things turn out to be extremely useful for education purposes. We go from school to school, and also festivals, local and national to try to get kids excited in STEM. It turns out and I mean no disrespect to our theoretical physicist colleagues that this is much more likely to get kids interested in science and engineering than string theories. I apologize if that's your area. With that, I will stop and I'll thank you for listening. Thank you.

Robert Wood: Robotic Insects

Electrical engineer Robert Wood leads a team that invents and develops entirely new classes of mircrorobots poised to play a transformative role in medicine, search-and-rescue missions, and agriculture.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.